New York Flora Association Blog

If you have not use the iNaturalist app to enter plant photographs and location information you haven’t had the opportunity to use the automatic identification feature. For those of us who have, we are increasingly amazed at how good it is at identifying the plant to species, especially those that are not grasses, sedges, or rushes. This feature works with computer machine learning that compares your photo to the millions of others in the database that have been confirmed by others to pick the closest match. It is not uncommon now to be on plant walks where people are using the app to identify plants instead of using plant ID books or to supplement them. The same thing is happening with other groups of organisms like birds that can be identified on a phone app by their song or call or by app keys like Merlin. It will be interesting to see how automatic ID progresses and how it will change what we use to identify plants. If you register for iNaturalist and enter an observation you can click on the species field and the program will give you a choice of species to select and the first species selected is often correct (see photo). If it is not correct then other people who use the site and know the correct identification can enter that. Then the computer can add that correct identification done by a human into its memory to refer to next time. The only challenge this auto ID has is that it can’t tell you why that is the species it chose, what the identifying characters are so you can learn them for next time. Maybe that feature will be included in the future. Check it out and let us know what you think.

This winter has been the perfect testament to the climate change our state (and the whole planet) is experiencing. In February maples and willows bloomed— over a month early for many places! One of the burning questions on every plant conservationist’s mind is how our native plants will weather this new weather. What will happen as our summers get wetter and hotter, and our winters subject to more extreme temperature fluctuations? Some scientists theorize southern populations of natives will gradually migrate further north, following favorable climate patterns. Others believe this will spell big trouble for plant diversity— on both a micro and macro scale: rapid changes in climate may not give plants enough time to adjust, diminishing not only the kinds of species capable of occupying any one habitat, but the genetic diversity of those species too. One thing is mostly agreed upon however—local populations of native plants have the best shot at making it through these changes and adapting to a potentially very different meterological reality. A new program in the east coast called ‘Seeds of Success’ seeks to provide land managers working to restore landscapes affected by climate change weather (think Hurricane Sandy and its demolishment of the sand dunes around New York City) with this kind of plant material in order to give these ecosystems the best chance at resiliency and facing off against new— and often damaging— weather patterns. Although Seeds of Success has been active in the western states for many years, it’s only recently that the program has begun work in the East. Working through the North Carolina Botanic Garden, the Mid Atlantic Regional Seed Bank, and the New England Wildflower Society the program sources seed from wild populations of native plants most critical to coastal restoration projects (like Solidago sempervirens, Spartina patens, and Distichilis spicata) and distributes them in bulk to end users like Fish and Wildlife, or state Departments of Environmental Protection/Conservation. Coastal landscapes from Chesapeake Bay to Long Island to the Boston Harbor Islands will benefit from this effort, hopefully making them better equipped to adjust to changes in the long run.

By Steve Young

With a title like this is was anybody’s guess what this book was about.  Michael Largo, author of “The Big Bad Book of Beasts” and other books (mostly about strange people), has compiled information about a wide variety of interesting plants from around the world “The World’s Most Fascinating Flora.”  Each species or taxonomic group (birches, bamboos, blue algae) has two or three pages devoted to information about its taxonomy, naming history, natural history, range, uses, and other odd aspects that the author hopes you have never heard about before.  A lot of information is well known but there are some stories I found interesting and fascinating.  I found myself saying Huh fairly often. Many of the species contain chemicals, poisons, or other dangerous plant parts that have wreaked havoc with humans over the ages. Some of them have made a large impact in other ways like primary food sources or building material. It’s a real potpourri of facts that makes the book useful and not useful at the same time. All of the information comes to us without citations so we don’t know how true it is and some of it will probably be cited by others thus carrying any misinformation forward. There is a short bibliography at the end but it certainly doesn’t cover the tremendous amount of information here.  The plants are listed alphabetically by common names, which are far from standardized, so it is hard to go back to a plant to look something up if you can’t remember the common name the author is using. For example, Humulus lupulus, Hops, are under Beer Plant and Nettles are in two places, under Nettle and under Bad Woman). To make matters worse there is no index to scientific names.  Each plant has an illustration in black and white but they are done by eighteen different artists so there is a wide variety of styles, some more in the style of scientific illustration and some not so scientific. Unfortunately, the drawings for water hyacinth and Victoria water lilies were switched. Because the facts come fast and furious, I found that I couldn’t read too many descriptions before I became fact fatigued but I just came back to the book another day and read more. This is a great book to have if you need some extra interesting information about plants that are on a walk you are leading or you want to gross someone out with a weird plant fact at a party (although, in his fig description, he missed the fact that we often eat dead wasp bodies that remain in the fig fruit after pollination).  It’s also a good book for some extra information about plants that make you go Huh.

Three new plant lists from Anne Johnson were posted at the NYFA plant list Google Map at http://www.nyflora.org/plant-lists/. The lists are for the preserves at Otter Creek, Crooked Creek, and Chippewa Creek near Route 12. Explore the map and see other plant lists around the state.  If you have a plant list you would like to post you can send it to nyflora1@gmail.com.  Have fun!

Where are these grapevines?

A relatively new app for the iPhone (sorry, no Android one yet), Context Camera is a great way to record the location, date, and time of the photos you take with the iPhone and have them displayed right on the photo. If you look at the latitude and longitude of the photo above of grape leaves you can see where I took it. Put put the coordinates into Google Maps with a negative sign in front of the longitude. The street view will show you the where the grape vines are. The app also shows the time of day, date, accuracy, and direction you are facing. There are two comment areas where you can enter up to 16 characters each. This is helpful for a plant name, collection number, collector, or anything else you can think of. I have been using it to record invasive plant locations I see and then using the info on the photo to enter an observation in the iMap invasives database at a later time, especially if I don’t have access to the database in the field on my phone. People have sent me photos with it so I can see where they have taken the picture. It’s a great tool for documentation and I highly recommend it for fieldwork. The location format can be set to many different styles including UTM.  The accuracy depends on how good your phone is and where you are but so far my points have been close to the plants and accurate enough. Give it a try!
Steve Young

I have found over the years that binoculars have become an indispensable part of botanizing for me. When I need to see plants that are inaccessible on foot or surveying an area by car, my binoculars let me see plants that I cannot get close to. Leaves high up in a tree, fruits way up on a vine, plants on a cliff, in the center of a deep marsh. All of these situations are helped by having a good pair of binoculars. If you turn them upside down and look the other way they can serve as a magnifying lens for looking at plant parts close-up. Take my advice and always have a pair of binoculars when you botanize. Oh yea, they are good for watching birds too.

Steve Young, NYFA